


The Way You Do

by skyz



Category: Glee
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-16
Updated: 2012-06-16
Packaged: 2017-11-07 21:15:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/435541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skyz/pseuds/skyz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life happens to Rachel Berry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Way You Do

It wasn't as if her dreams just died. No it wasn't like that, it was more subtle, a slow progression actually.

It started when her dad got sick in her junior year. He had a cough that just wouldn't leave and once she and her father convinced him to have it checked out, it was too late.

Cancer.

Rachel hated that word. Hated it so much it made her sick to her stomach.

So the cancer spread and she spent more time in the hospital than she did at home and school became a burden and something had to give. She wasn't that selfish and so she gave up glee. 

She could always sing and dance in the privacy of her own home and every minute she spent away from her dad felt like an eternity. 

It was slow and it wasn't. She watched him fade before her eyes. His skin sagged, his eyes grew hollow, his hair thinned, and his breath began to rattle when he breathed. 

Her father was broken hearted and needed her. 

Thoughts of Broadway and of playing Cosette and everything else began to fade and she didn't notice. 

Of course by this time she'd managed to form a sometimes tenuous friendship with the rest of the glee members and they tried to be there for her. Brought her food, tried to make her go out, talked to her, and generally tried to lend a shoulder. Or offer comfort sex in Puck's case. Santana had punched him in the gut for that. 

Of course Mr. Schuester tried to help and so did Ms. Pillsbury.

But she couldn't do it. She couldn't be their friend and help take care of her father. The choice in her mind had been easy to make. After all they hadn't wanted anything to do with her prior to glee and they'd be fine without her. 

So soon they stopped trying and left her alone. Most of them did but not all. 

Brittany still came with chocolate and casseroles and when she came Santana was always with her. Rachel was polite, always, but it didn't mean anything. 

Her dad died in the middle of her senior year. 

Her father was grief stricken, having been with her dad since they were both twenty, and he'd died so young that her father couldn't wrap his head around it. 

Grief was a thick and heavy fog that permeated throughout their house. 

Her father began to descend into a depression and Rachel feared leaving him alone even for a second. In a fit of rage he'd broken all their framed photographs and thrown out her dad's things. He'd ended up sobbing so hard she thought he'd pass out and had to take him to the hospital once he started trying to hurt himself.

Her grades slid, her mind wandered, and her body once so fine tuned, became fellable. 

She managed to graduate but thoughts beyond that didn't come anymore. The lights of Broadway didn't shine for her anymore. 

Rachel stayed in Lima because someone had to look after her father. 

And the Rachel Berry who'd been obsessed with making it, with being a star, began to seem like a mirage. A figment of her imagination. 

Now she was the Rachel Berry who got up and went to work at the local Save-n-Lot as a cashier and went home to a father too broken to be fixed. 

So when Santana Lopez appears in her line one day she's for the most part surprised and irritated.

"Berry." Santana greeted her with a nod. 

"Hello," Rachel said politely and began to ring up her items. 

A People magazine, a pack of gum, and a bottle of vodka. 

"I'll need some ID," Rachel told her as her register beeped as she scanned the alcohol.

Santana handed over her driver's license and Rachel was shocked. 

Her stomach jolted and her heart beat began to race. 

The date. 

Three years.

Three years. 

_Three years_.

She blinked slowly as she let that thought sweep over her. Three years had passed since graduation and she hadn't noticed. It was shocking and awful.

Swallowing hard she thrust the card back to Santana and finished ringing her up. 

"What time do you get off?" Santana asked, as she grabbed her bagged items. 

"Eight," Rachel found herself saying automatically. "I mean--why?"

Santana shrugged and with another nod walked off. 

Rachel stared after her feeling confused and a little sick.

When Rachel left work she found Santana leaning against the bumper of her car. 

"What are you doing here?" Had she missed something?

"I need a ride home," Santana said simply and left it at that. 

Rachel didn't bother to argue. 

She took her home. 

Barb, a neighbor, was staying with her father, who'd calmed over time, and just remained for the most part, depressed. So she had time to drop Santana off. 

They didn't talk. 

It happened again the next night.

"This is the best car you could afford?" Santana says, looking disapprovingly at her old reliable Volvo.

"If you don't want a ride," was how Rachel responds. 

Santana took the ride. 

Rachel realized almost belatedly that it was summer. It hadn't been particularly hot lately. 

"Brittany went to Europe. Some Dutch convention or maybe some twin thing. She wasn't too clear," Santana offers the next time. 

"Oh," was all Rachel has to say. 

It became a regular thing. 

"You know this could be a two-way thing. Where I talk and you respond with words other than a yes or a no. Or oh. You know you've gotta work on that, Berry. You suck at the strong silent type," Santana says one day when the day had been blistering and humid and now night had fallen it was just humid. 

It was July. 

She'd been giving Santana rides for almost a month.

A bead of sweat slid down her temple.

"Maybe I don't want to talk," Rachel muttered. Barely leaving off the to you. But it was implied and by the smirk that curled Santana's lips upwards, she knew Santana understood.

"Then what do you want to do?" Santana asked, lowly. "Because from what I can see you don't want to do anything, Berry. Just stay in this God awful town and die in it."

"You don't know anything."

"I know enough." Santana laughed and leaned back in her seat. 

"Don't judge me! You don't know anything about me, okay?" Rachel was surprised at the flare of anger Santana's words brought. When was the last time she'd been angry? She tried to think and found that she couldn't remember.

"Oh, excuse me. I must be wrong. Despite the clear evidence that you've fully submerged into your Lima loserness," Santana mocked. 

Rachel's lips thinned and she pulled the car over with a screech of tires. The sound echoed through her head and her pulse was pounding so hard it almost hurt.

"You can walk," Rachel muttered. 

"Did I get you angry, Berry?" Santana asked coolly as she opened her door. "It looks good on you."

Santana shut the door firmly behind her and started walking. 

Rachel stared at her retreating figure and didn't move for a long time. 

She was surprised to find Santana at her car the next night.

"A peace offering." Santana held up a red bag of Lindt chocolate. 

Rachel tried to recall the feeling of anger yesterday, but it felt vague and unreal.

She shrugged.

They got in the car.

"Did I tell you I liked your hair?" Santana asked and Rachel could feel her stare.

"No," Rachel said, but then reconsidered. Maybe she'd missed it because it seemed like she was missing a lot of things lately. She reached a hand up to touch her hair. She hadn't done anything special to it. Just the usual. "Really?" Rachel found herself asking in surprise, somehow feeling pleased.

"Really. I don't say things I don't mean."

She didn't take Santana home.

Rachel just drove and Santana let her.

"Did you know you're hot when you're angry, Berry? Even back in Glee. All that indignant anger and righteousness. Not a great combination but on you...it works."

This time when Rachel pulled the car over it wasn't to kick Santana out. 

She wound up on her back in the back seat of her car with Santana's fingers inside her and everything felt wonderful. Her nerve endings felt on fire. She could feel. The roughness of Santana's jeans, the tightness of arousal across her breasts, the softness of the skin at the small of Santana's back. Her heart raced, her mind blanked, and when she finally fell over the edge she felt invincible. 

Santana still talked and more often than not Rachel didn't talk back. She found that she didn't quite have the words yet, not anymore. They rattled around in her head but wouldn't come out.

Santana talked of all kinds of things. Talked about the other glee kids. Talked so much that she wondered if Santana kept talking because she knew that Rachel couldn't.

Brittany was back in New York City dancing and always had people slumming on her couch.

Kurt was in Chicago interning at some interior design business.

Quinn was in Florida with Puck for the summer to take their daughter to Disney World.

Finn... She'd felt a moment of nostalgia at his name. Finn was up in Montana playing at being a cowboy at a dude ranch.

Tina and Mercedes were in California and Santana didn't know what they were doing.

Artie was in Colorado interning at a company that produced eMagazines.

Everyone was doing something and she was here.

Stuck in Lima.

With Santana.

It made her think.

It made her hurt.

It made her bitter.

It made her angry.

It made her resigned.

They didn't always have sex, but more often than not they did, and Rachel found that she loved it. Loved that something about her made Santana _want_ her.

"Once a gleek always a gleek. It's like the Mickey Mouse club," Santana murmured to her one night, skin hot against Rachel's, the taste of her lingering on her tongue.

"You have to be jumped out?" The joke was lame but Santana's laughter made the effort worth it.

"Yeah, no." Santana muffled her laugh against she side of Rachel's throat and Rachel shivered as lips brushed light across her skin. "Worse, Rachel. Much worse."

"Yeah?" Rachel shifted, running her hand down Santana's back. She pressed a kiss to Santana's jaw.

Santana let the silence linger and then dramatically said, "You've gotta slushie out."

And Rachel laughed and for once it wasn't forced and it wasn't weird. It felt good.

Santana was the same on the surface, from her lush black hair down to the familiar smirk. But once she started talking Rachel realized she'd changed. It wasn't so much what she said, though it was enlightening, it was how she said it. Like she cared what Rachel thought. Like she cared about the things she talked about, about the people she mentioned.

Like how she knew where all the other glee kids were and what they were doing--but she thought Brittany had something to do with that more than anything.

Rachel didn't know what she was doing but always felt good afterwards. 

She looked forward to it. 

Rachel walked out at the end of her shift and expected to see Santana in her usual spot sitting on the hood of her car.

Santana wasn't there.

Of course it had to end, Rachel thought. 

But couldn't she have said something? Rachel wondered as she got into her car. She glared out the windshield and gripped the steering wheel so hard her fingers began to ache. 

"That's the polite thing to do," Rachel said aloud, anger a sudden burst inside of her. "You say hello and you say goodbye. You don't just _leave_."

"People always leave, Berry. That's just the way it is. People die and people leave all the fucking time," she recalled Santana telling her in sudden clarity. "Goodbyes are useless. Doesn't make you feel any better when they leave."

She turned on her lights and it was then she noticed a scrap of paper tucked under her wiper blade. 

Muttering to herself angrily she got back out and snatched it up. 

She squinted down at it and saw that it was an address scrawled sloppily across a torn piece of notebook paper. 

She balled it up and was about to throw it when she stopped herself.

She smoothed it out and folded it neatly before she put it in her pocket and drove home. 

And so she went back to work the next day and the next and fell back into her old routine. 

Except the note kept popping into her thoughts, tugging at her mind. 

It made her think. 

It made her hurt.

It made her bitter.

It made her angry.

It made her plan.

It wasn't so much an escape as it was a return to reality, a return to life. 

She'd been re-awakened. 

Her father was depressed, but he wasn't stupid, and when she told him that he needed to get help he didn't protest. And when they went to the doctor together he was prescribed medication. Rachel wondered why she'd wavered so long and kicked herself for allowing her father to dictate to her and her own passivity. 

It wasn't easy but then change never was. 

Her father sought out counseling.

Rachel went along.

Her work was tedious and the days turned into weeks and then into months.

Her excuse was that she couldn't _just_ leave.

Until suddenly it was almost summer again and it would have been a year and she was still here, in Lima, with a father on the mend and a dead end job.

She packed a duffel bag and kissed her father, in not a goodbye but a hello, and drove her old reliable Volvo out of town. 

The address burned into her memory and the note tucked safely in her pocket. 

"Britt's always picking up strays. Someone always comes knocking on her door," Santana had told her in exasperation.

And so Rachel knocked on that door and when Brittany opened it she didn't seem surprised at all.

"You're here," Brittany said with a grin and a tight hug. "S said that you'd come. And now you're here!"

So Brittany's couch became home and Rachel found herself re-emerging. 

Her mind began to fill itself up with show tunes, with lyrics, and the urge to sing became impossible to resist. 

When Santana came to town that summer all she said was, "Happiness looks good on you, Berry."

And Rachel could do nothing but agree.

**Author's Note:**

> This obviously takes place in an AU world and I wrote this in 2010 before the back nine had aired and Glee went to hell.


End file.
